


Chiaroscuro

by JoCarthage



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-11
Updated: 2017-03-11
Packaged: 2018-10-02 21:10:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10227422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoCarthage/pseuds/JoCarthage
Summary: After the end of things, Castiel and Dean find quiet together on the side of a mountain.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This one-shot has been sitting in a file for a few months; I decided it was time to clean it up and post. Hope you like it!

Cas walked up behind Dean, pulling his arms around his waist as the fire burned low in the hearth. The low, slow afternoon light was trickling down from the mountain top and around them, easing into the corners of the small kitchen, snaking around the curve of the steel sink.

Dean’s hands met his and they were still hard even while his gun callouses softened, getting replaced by rake callouses. They’d lucked into a small house on the edge of town on the mountain, but it had a huge yard. The trouble with saving the world one last time in the high of summer, meant by the time they moved into their place, the yard was fit for nothing but raking, raking, raking.

Cas offered to take some of the chores on, but there was something of nesting going on in Dean’s head, something of caring for a place that he had the chance to learn and love that changed him. At least they were touching; it hadn't always been that way.

\--

The first night after they got the keys to the house, after all the demons in the world had gone back for 100 years, and many of the other creature-races had banded together against the last, great evil, Dean had begged off going to bed, instead sitting in a hard wooden chair, a Vonnegut dangled between his knees. Cas’s grace hung from his neck, but here he was truly human, truly in need of sleep after a long day with the real estate agent. Cas had woken in the morning to find him still sitting.

Dean had napped during the day, catching an hour here, an hour there. Cas knew he was still deciding if he could share a bed; if he could manage that, given what he was dealing with in his own head.

And Cas let Dean have the luxury of time. But while he may have given up his immortality, he hadn’t bottled up his patience and hung it around his neck on a chord. He let Dean waste nights they could have spent curled in the heat of shared sheets, let him drag the sheets they'd bought together out to the couch, let him look hangdog and miserable, morning after morning. He let him do this for one reason: he had faith Dean would figured it out on his own. He would figure out how to love and be loved; and if all it took was time, well, they had some of that.

Sam visited on the third day, stomping in with arms full of pastries and beer. He had a smirk on his face, a smile that sagged when he saw the tumble of blankets on the couch and the other half of the set in the bedroom. When Dean stepped away to rake for the afternoon, Sam took to the kitchen, to watch out the window and wash some of the fishes that his treats had come in.

“He’s not sleeping again,” he said, voice low and sure, when he heard Cas walk in the room.

Cas nodded, not thinking he needed to say more.

“He might never come around,” Sam said, and Cas nodded again.

“He did once; he might again.”  
  
That once had been on top of a mountain, in the pouring rain, God demanding Dean kill Cas. Dean had held the knife in his mangled hand, blood and rain steaming down its silver triangular blade until it stained the white of Castiel’s shirt where he lay at Dean’s feet. He’d held it, pressed there, until he’d thrown it, hard and far, off the side of the mountain and fell to his knees, pushing his mouth against Cas’s, hands scrabbling down his arms to find his hands, wrap them around him self, to push the beat of their hearts together. 

In the kitchen, Cas squeezed his human eyes shut, just for a moment, recalling how Dean's green eyes had sparked in moment after so long covered in black darkness, and Castiel’s had met his, had felt them blaze blue. Somehow, between the light and the dark and their shared hot breaths, they’d made their point to God. That they’d had all the sacrifice, all the killing, these two souls were going to bear, and it was time for a change.

God let them off the hook, capricious until the last. He'd put them out to pasture and gotten to work fixing the world she’d left to molder, taking an active role in guiding her creation.

And so they chosen this place, on the side of that mountain where they'd canceled the apocalypse. They were left to build a life from the broken bottles of a thousand bar fights and left to eat from what they’d left behind. Not much; not much; just enough to live on. They had this land and the house on it, some money to work with, and the promise from Sammie that he’d call them in if things got too rough anywhere. And everyone assumed that they would make it work, together.

Sam was back to washing dishes--he'd chosen to stay in the fight, to keep his life twirled around the troubles of the growing world. He had said he understood why they’d stepped back, why they needed to heal. Cas had been thinking bout healing a lot, thinking about what it meant to heal. He thought about it, and thought about it, and realized he used to think it meant returning to factory settlings, becoming whole in the same way he’d been whole before. But because he’d been broken, Dean had been able to grow his roots through his cracks, and fill him up. He wouldn’t want to heal those cracks, because they would snap off those tiny, trembling pale roots that had taken to inhabiting his broken places. He could hope to be whole in a new way, but not the old way, not now, not ever.

He tried to think the same way about Dean, about what it meant to have him home and whole. Not sleeping in the bed was the smallest thing he could have mentioned, could have asked for.

They had dinner together, Sam taking off right after, saying he'd gotten a place in a motel, mumbling something about giving them their space. Dean went off to the garage to tune up Baby, getting a cleaner kind of grime under his fingernails than they had been used to. Cas went to the bedroom, and knelt.

Cas knelt back on his heels, bending in half until it was just his forehead resting on the starched white sheets. He wondered who had starched them; it hadn't been him. It must have been Dean, but who had taught him to do that? Maybe Bobby’s wife had shown him how and he just ran on automatic in the cleaning room; his house had always seemed so clean for that of a bachelor. Maybe it was something else, a sign. Castiel bent his head, and began his prayers, of thanksgiving, of hope. It took a long time.

When he was done, he opened his eyes, face staying down. The rug beneath his knees was frayed, torn edges of the thin grey and purple and green, with tendrils of deepest blue curling up where the edge used to be, snagging into a out of it, entirely and totally lost in the shapes, faded into the weathered grey wood. Perhaps the wood had been pine or something else, but now, it was a deep grey, like the steel-cut grey of the sky over South Dakota before a rain storm blooded the badlands. It was a special kind of grey, and he thought more about it. It was the grey of a dying man’s skin, of Dean’s, the last time he had almost died. It had been this level of pain that he'd felt, coming rushing back, this pain and distrust of the very option of having feelings.

He sobbed a breath out, feeling more and more like himself, less numb, like he'd felt this whole time, feeling his cracked edges grate in the old, familiar fashion. Castiel began breath again, hands coming up to grip the edge of the bed, feeling the starch creak under them--

And there was Dean’s hand, on his back, rubbing a long line down his spine:

"Just breath, man, breath," he said, voice low and sure in his ear. "Breath it out."

And Castiel did, breathing, feeling his back push against Dean's hand, worried than when he breathed in again, he would be gone. But he stayed, over and over again, he stayed, hand moving, rhythmically.

When he could think again, could see the carpet clearly, he turned and pulled himself into Dean's arms. He was still, stiff for a moment, but Castiel burrowed in, dug in, made clear what he wanted. And Dean--

His arms softened, clasping Cas gently, giving him space to move but no room to run.

Castiel looked up into his kind, green eyes and said: "Stay with me. Tonight. Stay in the bed, with me."

And Dean's eyes widened, and shifted to the side, and Castiel buried his face in his shoulder, cataloguing every inch of this feeling in case it was the last.

"Aren't you--" Dean started, then cleared his voice, speaking at a lower pitch: "Aren't you scared, something might happen?"

And Castiel laughed; after millennia fighting demons and creatures and this wonderful, insufferable man, he wasn't sure what fear was, other than the fear that they would spend forever sitting in his house and never make it a home.

Dean pulled back, arms drifting away: "I'm serious, Cas. What if I turn again, what if I turn back?"

And Castiel stilled, knowing this was something he needed to answer. He spoke, but slowly: "I don't think you can." He tapped his grace, hanging on his chest. "I think God took all of that out of you. And if she didn't, she didn't spare us up there," and he jerked his chin at the mountain top, "So you could gank me down here."

Dean nodded, eyes worried. Castiel pulled out from under Dean's leather jacket, pulling the man's hands in front of them to grip.

"Say you don't want me." He started, pressing Dean's hands to his chest and holding them there. "Say you don't care about me; say you don't love living together, the peace of it. Say what happened on the mountain was desperation or friendship or, hell, a one-time thing. Say you don't want this." And he tapped their hands against his chest again.

"But don't tell me what I need to be scared of; don't tell me to be afraid of you, because that's never going to happen. Not on that mountain, and not in our room." Dean's eyes were wide, and he sucked a breath in through his teeth before saying, low, and harsh like a whisper:

"I do, I want--" and he leaned forward, pulling Cas to him in an embrace, speaking into his ear: "I do, I just need--"

Castiel sighed, arms raising to encompass this difficult, beloved man, pulling him in again. "Time. Yes, Dean, I know."

"You know?" Dean asked, voice somewhat muffled by Cas's shoulder.

"Yes, Dean." And Castiel tipped his head, considering: "I think you could do it in steps; you don't have to jump into love all at once." And Castiel was surprised them Dean jerked back--

"It's not the love part that's a problem, Cas--I love you." And it was like fireworks in his belly and champagne on his tongue, hearing it said, that way, that honestly. Just; the best kind of things, all at once.

Dean continued, hands still still on Cas's shoulders: "It's the other stuff, the physical stuff. I want to, I want to do it right, but it might take some--"

"Time." Castiel said, this time with a smile.

Dean smiled back.

That night, they slept in the bed, with separate comforters. 

(Cas was a cover-thief.)

\-- 

Dean still spent his days raking, pulling up weeds. He'd bought a bit of software that let him plan out of garden; he'd told Castiel it would be some kind of moonlight garden. He planted flowers with leaves of sweet grey and purple that would shine in the moonlight; flowers specially picked to attract big, winged moths and sweeping bats. Castiel had smiled; it was perfect. 

They planted it where they could see it from their bedroom, late at night, in the comfort of each other's arms with the fire lowly burning in the hearth. Dark and light, together, the way they were meant to be.


End file.
